If you’re the type to do your homework before you buy a movie ticket, odds are you’ve consulted the Tomatometer.
The backbone of the film website Rotten Tomatoes, the meter aggregates ratings from both critics and readers. It serves up an impartial snapshot of a movie’s public perception, but there’s a uniquely Bay Area story behind the score.
The history of Rotten Tomatoes, like so many Bay Area legacies, began in the tech boom of the late 1990s. Senh Duong, Stephen Wang and Patrick Lee met at UC Berkeley while practicing Wushu martial arts and started a web design firm called Design Reactor, which attracted several big entertainment industry clients like ABC and Disney. As a side project, Duong wanted to make a fan site to catalog the reviews of his favorite actor, Jackie Chan, in his big Hollywood breakout in “Rush Hour.”
As a contrast to most film advertising at the time, the site would feature both positive and negative reviews instead of just glowing quotes. Senh spent two weeks hand-coding the site, with a name inspired by the 1992 film “Léolo” from Canadian director Jean-Claude Lauzon. When “Rush Hour” was delayed a few months, the group of friends decided to expand the site to include other hit summer films like “Blade.”
Like most fledgling sites at the time, at first it was only clocking around a hundred hits a day. Current editor-in-chief Joel Meares happened to be one of those first few hundred visitors.
“I quickly adopted it as not just my homepage, but also the way I discovered film, and writing about film. 1999 and 2000 was a very exciting period for a teenager,” says Meares. “You had these movies like ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Crouching Tiger,’ all these things that a 15-year-old kid like me wouldn’t have discovered without a website like Rotten Tomatoes.”
But it quickly picked up steam. Yahoo listed it as their site of the day, then a week later USA Today and Netscape featured it. A positive mention from Roger Ebert gave it a sense of credibility in the film community.
When asked why the Bay Area birthed the site, Rotten Tomatoes editor Alex Vo, who started as an intern in 2006, traced the origins to the founders’ Asian roots.
“I see it from an Asian American perspective,” said Vo. “Senh talked about seeing Jackie Chan on screen, that it was a way of seeing himself represented on-screen. With the Bay Area having so many Asian Americans living there, it was built out of a reflection and desire of representation.”
The proximity to the tech industry also didn’t hurt. In January 2000, the site raised $1.2 million and grew to 25 employees, moving from their first web design offices on Shattuck Avenue to the waterfront in Emeryville. Soon after, the tech bubble burst. They downsized to a staff of eight and everyone took 30% pay cuts (Duong's salary dropped to zero). At that point, Duong ended up moving out of his home and sleeping in his cubicle, literally hiding clothes in his desk drawers.
After weathering the next few years, Duong and his co-founders sold the site to IGN Entertainment in 2004. From there, it changed ownership several times, being absorbed by Fox Interactive Media in 2005, then sold to Flixter in 2010, acquired by Warner Bros. in 2011, and then sold again to Fandango in 2016, although Warner still has a minority stake (their offices are now in Los Angeles).
For those unfamiliar with the site, it operates on a percentage score scale. Films rated above 60% earn a tomato icon, those below 60% are represented with a green splat (the worst ever being “Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever” starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu). In 2004, the site introduced their “certified fresh” rating, a distinction earned when a film consistently scores over 75%, with a minimum number of reviews (80 for major films, 40 for limited releases) and at least five reviews from vetted “Top Critics” (the first ever certified fresh film was “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”). For a brief period, they actually sent out physical awards (one of the first went to Tina Fey for “Mean Girls”). There’s also an audience score, which they ensure isn’t unfairly weighted by verifying that users have actually purchased a ticket (thanks to that Fandango partnership).
Early on, the field of critics was composed of traditional print journalists, but as the internet has expanded, so has their criteria for verification. A critics curation manager joined in 2017 and revamped their accreditation system, which opens twice a year for applications. There are now more than 5,000 critics, with a council of advisers who helped decide on 170 new top critics in 2020 (60% were women, 25% were women of color, and 20% were YouTubers or podcasters).
“We’re trying to reflect what’s happening in media, and who’s consuming the content that filmmakers and TV makers are producing,” says Meares.
Although still functioning primarily as an aggregator, in recent years, Rotten Tomatoes has become more than just a survey of voices from the film industry, but also a critical reflection on it. Building on their treasure trove of reviews, the site now features editorial content that gives both data-driven analysis of the entertainment industry (“The 100% Club: An Ode to Movies with a perfect Tomatometer score”), critical arguments against their own scores (“Hear Us Out: 'Josie and the Pussycats' is the most underrated music film of the past 20 years”), and interviews where stars like Marisa Tomei and Ben Schwartz share their five favorite films. And since this is 2021, of course they have a podcast network, a 24/7 TV channel on Roku and Peacock and a forthcoming book that they’re not supposed to talk about.
But regardless of how far they take their own editorializing (and questionable opinions about "Josie and the Pussycats"), the heart of the site will always remain the sacred, unimpeachable Tomatometer, a bastion of impartiality in an otherwise questionable sea of algorithmic recommendations.
“The simplicity of the Rotten Tomatoes concept, which not to get all cheesy, has been essentially that way from day one,” says Meares, “is that it’s pretty incorruptible. It’s just fresh or rotten.”
June 23, 2021 at 06:04PM
https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/rotten-tomatoes-bay-area-history-16256239.php
Everything you ever wanted to know about Rotten Tomatoes, including its Bay Area roots - SFGate
https://news.google.com/search?q=rotten&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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